Various freedom of information laws acknowledge the importance of information being provided to the requester in a machine readable format, when that information originates from such a system. I'm not arguing that this applies to police asking a private entity for information, just that the courts/regulators are not ignorant about the difference between machine-readable data and "oh just do a search and copy-paste it from the website".

http://www.justice.gov/oip/blog/foia-post-2009-annual-foia-r...

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/08/25/freedom-of-inf...